By Tom Nondorf
03 Sep 2008

	Jim Caruso
	photo by Bill Westmoreland

Cabaruso
What's Jim Caruso got going on? Let's see, Monday nights, he hosts the most freewheeling gathering of musical talent since Ted Mack went off the air. His Cast Party at Birdland is the perfect place to see/be seen, hear/be heard, chill/get chills: an open mic that brings out all manner of talented Broadway and cabaret stars and newcomers, all tied together with Caruso's self-effacing charm. Also at Birdland, Caruso produces the Broadway at Birdland series that brings great stage talent to the hallowed jazz hall on a regular basis. Oh, did I mention the worldwide tour he has been on, dancing and singing behind Liza, re-creating portions of the much-revered nightclub act of Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers? As Liza indicated at the Tonys, it just might be setting up shop on The Great White Way.

Q: So, how's it going?
Jim Caruso: Really? Is that how this is going to go? [Laughs.]

Q: I mean everything. So much brewing for you right now.
Caruso: I'm absolutely enchanted at how things are going at Birdland. It's the most fantastic time in my career, and I've never been as excited about all the things I have going on.

Q: How do you manage the touring you do with Liza and the scheduling of the Broadway at Birdland concert series and your weekly Cast Party at Birdland?
Caruso: There's this thing called the interweb that all the kids love, and I'm able to do all my Broadway Birdland Cast Party promotion stuff on a laptop while I'm on the road with Liza. And, the Birdland staff is fantastic, and I have a great publicist that works on the Broadway at Birdland series. Essentially, I can be two places at once. The only thing I can't do when we're on the road for a long period of time is host Cast Party, but that's only happened a handful of times, and I get fantastic guest hosts like Christine Lavin and Christine Pedi and Scott Siegel, who understand the evening very well. They each have great followings of their own, and they all bring a lot to the hosting table, so we're in good shape then.

Q: Tell me about a typical Cast Party.
Caruso: This last week was insane. It was really wacky. Liza came in and sang two tunes with Billy Stritch. She brought her friend Mary-Louise Parker. Hello? [Liza] dedicated "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" — which she does with Billy — to Mary-Louise, who was totally into the night, screaming and yelling for everybody. We had LaLa Brooks, who is a newcomer. She was the lead singer from The Crystals, and in 1963, she had a little hit called "Da Doo Ron Ron," and she looks like she's 25 years old. I don't know what she's done to keep that amazing body and face. She's just spectacular looking. She came in and just ripped the roof off of Birdland. Laurel Masse, who was one of the original girls in the Manhattan Transfer was there. We had Liza, Laurel, LaLa, and all we needed was Lucy Arnaz to complete the "L" thing. We had the cast of Altar Boyz, which always goes over like gangbusters. The cast of Enter Laughing [was also there]. I love being able to present and promote shows here in town and celebrate casts of shows. That's really thrilling to me because my background was kind of in the theatre, so any time we can help promote shows, I'm just over the moon.

Q: What are the nuts and bolts of setting up such an evening?
Caruso: For the open mic of it all, we end up with about 30–40 performers every Monday night, and obviously not everybody gets on, but I try to get everybody up to sing. Cast Party kind of runs itself as far as people knowing about it and coming in. Every once in awhile we have to goose it a little bit. Certainly, a night with Liza helps business. The Broadway at Birdland series is certainly time consuming, booking and promoting and keeping that as high-end as I can, with concerts: people like Chita Rivera, Christine Ebersole is coming back for a week, Jason Robert Brown. The best of the best that I can get onstage.

Q: Talk about Birdland itself, a throwback to when New York had a lot more such nightclubs.
Caruso: Listen, I stepped in it when I walked into Birdland. I kissed a lot of frogs to get there [laughs]. To me it's the best musical room in the country. I have sung in most of them. Just as a performer, it's thrilling to work that stage. There's a nine-foot Bösendorfer Concert Grand onstage, which is an extraordinary instrument. The sound is the best, the lighting is great. The staff is over the moon. I'm not just sucking up here, I honestly think it's the best musical room I've ever played in my life, and I am thrilled to be there but also to be able to open it up to performers I think are deserving of it. I go to a lot of nightclubs, and I think these performers deserve the highest-end room possible, and that's what we're giving them. I just went out today and bought red lacquer paint for the dressing room door. A couple years ago, we jazzed up the dressing room. My friend Doug Wilson, who's on "Trading Spaces," helped me jazz up the dressing room, and I mean, jazz up is exactly what we did. It is bright red and white and swanky looking. I decided that the door needed to be bright-red lacquer, so we're doing that today. We're a full-service production company here. We paint the doors, we installed the toilet [laughs]. Whatever we have to do to make the room the best we can muster is what Birdland does and what I like to do. I love to treat the performers like gold — because they are!

Q: For those unfamiliar, give the background of the show you've been doing with Liza. The original Kay Thompson/Williams Brothers act is spoken of in such reverent tones by folks who saw them.
Caruso: Kay Thompson was the vocal arranger at MGM in the forties and the vocal coach to people like Judy Garland and Mel Tormé and Lena Horne. Three nobodies! And, she really jazzed up MGM. I mean, she took the sound of movies from [vocals that were] very angelic choir-y sounding, and she blew that to smithereens — she brought in jazz. She was a huge fan of jazz, and she really brought movie music up to date. She was Liza's godmother, and she also wrote a little book called "Eloise," about the little girl who lives at the Plaza Hotel. She was just a renaissance woman. Everything she did, she did brilliantly, then she'd move on and do something else totally different. I got to know her when she moved into Liza's apartment when she was in her nineties. I had certainly been a fan, but just getting to know her was extraordinary. After she died, Liza and I were talking for years about singing Kay's music, and one day Liza called me and said, "Here we go! Are you with me?" And I said, "Yeah!" So she asked me to be one of the Williams Brothers, along with Cortes Alexander, Johnny Rogers and Tiger Martina, with Billy Stritch at the piano and her brilliant 12-piece orchestra, and we've taken this show all over the world: South America, Scandinavia, all over Europe; we did a week at the Coliseum in London. We killed them in Antwerp. You may quote me. Talk about out-of-town tryouts, this thing has been all over the planet. Recently, at the Tonys, Liza announced that we're taking the show to Broadway, so it sounds like it is really going to happen. My fingers are so crossed I can barely dial the phone. It would be thrilling.

Q: Having heard so much about Kay and the Williams Brothers, it sounds like an incredible show.
Caruso: If nothing else, New York audiences need to see Liza being so brilliant and singing and dancing her fanny off again. And, the Kay Thompson arrangements are life-changing. You can't believe these incredible tight harmonies we get to sing, and Ron Lewis has choreographed it to a fare-thee-well. It is so much fun and crazy high energy. It's so my taste, it is hard to get out of it enough to be really critical of it, but as an audience member, I would flip out, so anyone else like me, they're going to love it.

Q: Has Andy Williams ever come out to see the show?
Caruso: Andy hasn't come, but we just opened the Hollywood Bowl a couple months ago for the season with the L.A. Philharmonic, and Dick Williams was there, who I play! After the show, there was a knock on our dressing room door, and somebody said, "Liza wants to see you." And I went to the dressing room, thinking, "I wonder what I did." I walked in, and there was a guy there with these unbelievably blue eyes, and I said, "Oh my God, you're Dick Williams!" And he said, "No, you're Dick Williams!" And he hugged me and just seemed really thrilled and kind of startled that it was being brought back so well and with so much love.

Q: That had to be an incredible compliment to hear.
Caruso: It was a compliment to all of us, first of all, that he would be there. And, yeah, it was thrilling to be able to entertain him. It was a highlight. And then there were fireworks over the stage…coming out of the band shell thing. Crazy! Just another night in the glamorous life of Jim Caruso.

Q: It does sound like there's some glamour.
Caruso: That was a good night. That made up for all the horrendous nights of my life!

Q: Speaking of which, how about the Jim Caruso life story.
Caruso: My parents were both musicians. In fact, this is a very over-told story, but I had an act with my mother called "Son of a Bitch." She played piano and I sang, and it was horrendous, as you might guess.

Q: Was that here in New York?
Caruso: [Laughs.] No. God, no! It was in Dallas, Texas, where we played happy hours at fish restaurants, and that sounds like shtick, but I have pictures.

Q: How does that not still happen?
Caruso: Shocking, isn't it? We can't find a fish restaurant with a happy hour in New York. Anyway, that got me into the nightclub scene. I put a trio together called Wise Guys, and that took off. We came to New York, Liza came to see us, we were her opening act. Joan Rivers came to see us, we were her opening act. When that broke up, I went to work for Liza, I got involved in TV production and PR. And, I was doing PR for a defunct nightclub, I threw a party one Monday night, everybody came and sang until three in the morning. The club called me the next day, and said, "Would you do that again?" I said, "No." And five years later, I'm still doing it. And that's my life. Good evening.

	Jim Caruso
	photo by Mark Rupp

Q: I think one great thing about your Cast Party shows is the variety of music one can hear. You don't take a narrow cabaret approach.
Caruso: I love saying this, but I was at the Kanye West concert at Madison Square Garden a couple weeks ago, and believe me — I love saying that because it makes me sound either hip or mentally imbalanced — but I loved it! Do I sit around listening to Kanye West? No, but the production of that show was so insanely over-the-top and brilliant, if you couldn't get something out of that for your own damn cabaret act, then you are not looking. I think it's weird that people will only go see other acts just like themselves. The interesting thing: We travel so much with Liza, we were in Brazil, in Rio, and Liza knows all those bossa nova dudes. Those original guys that created the bossa nova with Jobim, and they threw parties for us —meaning for her— every night. And there was music till four and five in the morning. What I thought was interesting was, these were the original bossa nova dudes, but also, there were these 20-something guys that were adding hip-hop to bossa nova and rap to bossa nova, and everybody knows each other and everybody got along. And, the old guys are thrilled with the new guys, and the new guys are so honored to know the old guys, it's very impressive. And you don't see that here. You don't see Mary J. Blige at a Margaret Whiting concert much I don't think. I think that's really too bad. I mean, why not?

Q: People like to stay in their comfort zone.
Caruso: The Great American Songbook lives on, folks, and it is being written by country writers and pop singers and stars and R&B. That doesn't mean I have to sit around and listen to Kanye West all day, because I certainly don't. But I like knowing he's out there and knowing what he does. It keeps me a little ahead of the game, pop culture-wise. I was talking to Phyllis Newman the other day. I was amazingly surprised when I told her I went to the Kanye West concert and she was like, "I love him!" She went up like a thousand points in my estimation of her intelligence, that she knows who he is. I think it makes you more of an interesting person, and that's my goal: To someday be mildly interesting.

Q: Well, I'm all for that.
Caruso: [Laughs.] Wait. What did that mean?

[Birdland Jazz Club, where Broadway at Birdland and Jim Caruso's Cast Party happen, is located at 315 West 44th Street. Cast Party takes place every Monday from 10 PM-1 AM. Go to birdlandjazz.com or castpartynyc.com for more information or call (212) 581-3080. Check out officiallizaminnelli.com for her tour schedule.]

Hither and Yon
Announced performers for Scott and Barbara Siegel's tribute to Lerner and Loewe at Town Hall on Oct. 17 include Brent Barrett, Euan Morton, Daniel Reichard, Max von Essen and Jim Caruso himself. ("Somebody must have lost a bet," he surmises.)…Michael Kostroff and Adam Wylie will be Max and Leo, respectively, in Long Island's Gateway Playhouse production of The Producers. For tickets call (888) 4-TIX-NOW, or look on the web at www.gatewayplayhouse.com…Names from other shows happening as part of NYMF this year: Jim J. Bullock in The Fancy Boys Follies, Brandon Espinoza in College, Kevin Cahoon in Bonnie and Clyde, Austin Miller in The Jerusalem Syndrome, Gavin Creel and Aaron Tveit in a concert featuring the songs of Benj Pasek and Dustin Paul and lots more. Again, check out www.nymf.org for full details… True original musical theatre absurdist, alchemist, and sometimes Lamb's Club Lo-Jinx host Peter Dizozza has two appearances at Sidewalk Bar and Restaurant scheduled for September: Sept. 10 and 28, the latter at which he will be trading tunes with Preston Spurlock. Sidewalk is located at 94 Avenue A and 6th Street. Check out www.cinemavii.com for details… Lots of nominees for best vocal group LP of show music that I asked about last month. Someone mentioned one of my favorites, The Kirby Stone Four's My Fair Lady LP. "Four on the Aisle" by The Four Lads came up, although I prefer their LP of all Frank Loesser material. Someone mentioned the Indigo Girls involvement with "Jesus Christ Superstar: A Resurrection," a collection of songs from that show which I was not aware of and now must investigate...Your audiophile question of the month: What is the rarest show recording you have (not counting cassette recordings of your high school performances, but anything else you've run across out there in the audio jungle)? Do tell. I shall share some rarities next month. Take care!

Tom Nondorf can be reached at tnondorf@playbill.com.

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